More from the inane and appalling front:
Charla de la mierda: Spanish Senator Luz Elena Sanín recently claimed the country’s economic problems were caused by “subsidies for NGOs and homosexuals” — you know that latter term; NGOs are non-governmental organizations, what we usually call non-profits. A member of the ruling Populist Party, Sanín quickly issued a statement saying that her remarks were taken out of context. Funny how every wacky wingnut’s slurs are always taken out of context. One can only wonder in what context her absurd and insulting comment would make sense.
Hot dogs are a different matter: “When people sit down to eat a hamburger, the last thing they want to be thinking about is two guys having sex.” Those who follow anti-gay crazies will immediately recognize this quotation as coming from Bryan Fischer, the American Family Association goofball whose obsession with gay sex is boundless. With the burger quote, Fischer was responding to Burger King’s fabulous Pride Whopper, served up by one of the fast-food chain’s San Francisco locations. Visitors to the Bay Area already know that the city boasts many Pride Whoppers that have no connection to hamburgers whatsoever but are still quite popular with gay men.
Media Circus
Leave it to Utah: Our friends at Guardian Liberty Voice reported that Facebook donated $10,000 to the re-election campaign of Sean Reyes, Utah’s anti-gay attorney general. Republican Reyes has made his position against same-sex marriage an integral part not only of his campaign but also of his tenure in office. Facebook lamely argues that the company makes “decisions about which candidates to support based on the entire portfolio of issues important to our business, not just one.” I agree. Alienating and enraging a huge part of its user community is definitely a single issue.
Where bigots go, trouble follows: QNotes, an LGBT newspaper serving the Carolinas, reports, “A national anti-LGBT hate group will hold a nationally-broadcast ‘Star-Spangled Sunday’ at First Baptist Church on Sunday, September 14, featuring US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R).” Other notable assholes scheduled to attend the event “include the Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins, as well as Jason and David Benham, twin anti-gay evangelicals.” Oh, Lord — they come in matched sets now?
Church Chat: From San Diego Gay and Lesbian News comes a survey of rabidly homophobic church signs. The Westboro Baptist Church comedy troupe brings us “Fags and Enablers All Burn in Hell,” a slogan that, in the opinion of this critic, is tired and probably wrong as well. “Fags and Enablers Party in Hell” would be more to the point. The Devon Park United Methodist Church in Wilmington, North Carolina, offers a kinky new proposition: “A true marriage male and female and God.” Um, does God participate or does he — like Chauncey Gardner in “Being There” — just like to watch? The Blood of Jesus Atlah World Missionary Church in our own fair city proposes that “Jesus Would Stone Homos.” That only stands to reason: Jesus is without sin, so he gets to throw the opening pitch. Also according to the BJAWMC, “All Churches and Members That Support Homos Cursed Be Thou with Cancer HIV Syphilis Stroke Madness Itch Then Hell.” I don’t know have any novel insights about the other stuff, but cortisone cream does wonders for itches.
Sleeping with the enemy: From the New York Daily News comes this delightful gem: “While a top anti-gay group activist was preaching through a megaphone against same-sex couples in Texas, his soon-to-be ex-wife was cozying up with a woman, court documents have revealed.” In August 2011, Corrine Morris Rodriguez Saenz served divorce papers on her husband, Jonathan Saenz — who is now president of the all-too-appropriately named Texas Values — after telling him that she was having an affair with a woman. The Daily News goes on to report that less than six months later, Saenz, then a conservative consultant for the radical right Liberty Legal Institute in Austin, went on to get the top job at Texas Values — despite his demonstrated inability to keep his own wife on the team.
“Swapping spit”: From the always reliable PinkNews.com: The St. Louis County Police Department in Missouri took one on the chin when one of its officers, Dan Page, shoved a CNN reporter, out gay Don Lemon, “out of the way in the middle of a live link, reporting on unrest in Ferguson.” Note to Page: Make sure the camera is off before manhandling reporters. It isn’t good public relations to knock them away in full view of the television audience — particularly when undue police force is the issue animating the news coverage in the first place.
Page’s Lemon-bashing didn’t merit any particular response from the police department, but when a video surfaced in which he rants for an hour on sexist, racist, and anti-gay themes at an Oath Keepers group meeting for police and military personnel, the officer was placed on administrative leave.
“If you take a stand against sodomy, you are a terrorist; the next phase is prosecution,” Page declared. “There is a couple in New Mexico right now who are being prosecuted because they refused to take pictures of sodomites. In the military right now, you have open sodomy, people holding hands, swapping spit together — sickening. It’s pitiful.”
Page is also upset that there are “four sodomites on the Supreme Court” trying to destroy the Constitution. He’s factually incorrect on that last point; the four liberal justices are actually from Gomorrah. (Or is it Glocca Morra?)
How to get ahead in politics: From Raw Story, we learn that Gordon Klingenschmitt, a GOP state legislative candidate in Colorado, recently sent out an email alert to his supporters warning them of a cancer at the heart of the state’s US House of Representatives delegation: “Democrats like [Jared] Polis want to bankrupt Christians who refuse to worship and endorse his sodomy. Next he’ll join ISIS in beheading Christians, but not just in Syria, right here in America.”
It was all a joke, Klingenschmitt explained after the story blew up in his face. The candidate had written “The openly homosexual congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) introduced a revised bill to force Christian employers and business owners to hire and promote homosexuals with ZERO RELIGIOUS EXEMPTIONS for Christians who want to opt out.”
So naturally Klingenschmitt brought beheading into the conversation. Wouldn’t you? Polis aims to revise the current draft of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act — stalled, by the way, for the past two decades — so that religious exemptions that don’t weaken employment nondiscrimination protections for blacks, Jews, and women also don’t gut the same protections for gays and lesbians.
And that, of course, is an outrageous proposition. Gordon Klingenschmitt is a profile in courage.
Just kiddin’.
Follow @edsikov on Twitter.
